What a Dominatrix Can Teach You about Love

While researching the #MeToo phenomenon, I discovered Kasia Urbaniak, a former Dominatrix. She was once paid $64,000 for a 10-minute session, a handsome fee that went toward her college tuition. Today, she teaches women-empowerment classes in New York. Her classes sell out. Soon she’ll be taking her training online including her popular, “Cornering Harvey” class.

It may surprise you that the essence of the class is teaching women to be in their power and how to treat men as people. You see, Urbaniak spent enough time in Daoist monasteries to come within four days of being ordained a nun.

Political correctness has taught women that they need to speak up and be heard. But Urbaniak understands the reality is that in the clinch, smart empowered women often choke. Then we freeze.

What happens next is a sort of tumbling down the staircase of the psyche, as we try to desperately to break the fall from within. But rarely do we marshal our agency in the heat of the moment.

To prevent the freeze, Urbaniak takes women through a process that uses the elements of worldly and spiritual strength: being present in your body, standing fearlessly in your sexuality, and flipping the power dynamic by understanding the strength of your own intentions.

I write about Kasia Urbaniak because the #MeToo meme is digging a deep rut into the culture that could grow cavernous. Whether it’s Moira Donegan’s “Shitty Men in Media” spreadsheet, or women marching in pussy hats, or men being shamed out of their corner offices and titles, we can expect more, not less outcry.

The #MeToo momentum will continue as long as there is a fuel supply of rage.

As a former colleague, the late Watts Wacker believed, “going viral” was often the wrong metaphor for movements. He favored the forest fire analogy. When the neglected forest gets parched, it only takes a single match to burn it all down. That is where we find ourselves today.

For good men, this moment in the history is dicey. After all, we train our men to be warriors, and then are surprised when they act that way. What does it mean to be an honorable man in these times?

Actor David Schwimmer addresses that question with a series of six instructive videos that depict sexual harassment. It’s a worthy start.

It’s Valentine’s Day. Here I am blogging about unromantic trends like empowerment training by a Dominatrix, #MeToo, and sexual harassment. How incredibly tone deaf of me, right? Especially when clearly what the world needs now is love sweet love to riff on an old song lyric.

It comes down to this: what the world needs now is men and women seeing each other as human beings. Not assets, nor opportunities, nor impulse grabs. But people.

Let’s lead with the simplest truth about love: It is within all of us…equally.